Invitation to take part in a burial in Saint-Malo.

[Burial]. M[onsieur Bourdet]. Vous êtes priés d’assister à l’Enterrement de Demoiselle Therese-Jeanne-Guillemette DONAT, qui se fera demain Jeudi 11 Mars 1784, à l’Eglise Ste. Anne, à dix heures & demie. Requiescat in pace. S.l. [Saint-Malo]: s.n., [1784]. [25.8 x 19.0 cm], [1] f. letterpress sheet, with woodcut headpiece and initial, completed in manuscript, with manuscript annotations on verso. Horizontal fold, edge wear, dustiness, a few stains, some toning.

Unrecorded, rather large, French invitation to the burial of a certain Therese-Jeanne-Guillemette Donat on 11 March 1784. The sheet is headed by a (quite vernacular) skull-and-crossbones woodcut and includes a skull-and-crossbones initial “M” to be filled in by hand to read “Monsieur,” “Madame,” or “Mademoiselle.” This invitation is addressed in manuscript to a certain Monsieur Bourdet.

There is no indication on the sheet of where the burial took place, but genealogies record a Thérèse-Guillemette-Jeanne Donat who was born on 19 January 1757 and died on 10 March 1784 (Paul Paris-Jallobert, Anciens registres paroissiaux de Bretagne: baptîmes, mariages, sépultures: Saint-Malo, vol. 1 [1898], p. 325). She was the daughter of Pierre-Marin Donat of Saint-Malo, who served as first lieutenant on Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s 1673-74 voyage to the Falkland Islands (Les îles Malouines) (see, Antoine Joseph Pernety, Histoire d’un voyage aux isles Malouines, fait en 1763 & 1764; avec des observations sur le detroit de Magellan, et sur les Patagons [1770], p. 378).

The addressee of this announcement, Monsieur Bourdet, is perhaps the Saint-Malo notary and procureur Gilles-Louis Bourdet (Paris-Jallobert, p. 144). The sheet was reused by Bourdet, who tallied business expenses on its verso.

OCLC and KVK locate no other examples of this announcement.